SECTION II. EXAMPLES OF LECTIO DIVINA....
SECTION II. EXAMPLES OF LECTIO DIVINA.
1.1 THE PARABLE OF THE TALENTS.
I would like to illustrate how the method works by applying it to the Parable of the Talents (Mt. 25:14-30). Please have the text of the Gospel in front of you. You may like to begin with a prayer for the guidance of the Holy Spirit and then read the text.
As you read this passage for the first time, see if everything in it makes sense to you. Verse 29 ('Everyone who has will be given more...') may puzzle you; we will return to this verse later. The master's attitude to the third servant may strike you as harsh. Don't jump from that to attribute to God a harshness that would go against all we know of God from the rest of the New Testament.
Now you can divide up the passage, eventhough it is all one parable:
- verses 14 to 16 set the scene;
- verses 16 to 18 describe how the three servants responded;
- verses 19 to 27 describe the time of accounting;
- verses 28 to 30 give the master's final judgment.
Now over a period of time, read this passage over and over, feeling free to stay with any part of the parable or with the parable as a whole.
1.2. MEDITATING AND PRAYING THE PARABLE.
Suppose you are meditating on the text and you are struck by the willingness of the man to entrust all his property to his servants for a long time. You admire his ability to trust people and to give them responsibility. As you ponder over this you are reminded of someone you have known who was like that. It may be someone for whom you have worked. Spontaneously you are moved to pray in thanksgiving: ‘Lord, I thank you for that person who entrusted her property to me, may she be rewarded for her readiness to trust me.’ At this point you have read, meditated and prayed.
You may continue to meditate on this same point in the story and this time you remember a time in your childhood when you were given a particular responsibility by your teacher and trusted to carry it out. You are moved to pray in thanksgiving. If you are a parent you may recall the trust you place in your own children and the benefit this has been for them. Again you thank God. You may remember a time when your teenage child complained, ‘You don’t trust me’ and you pray in petition for the wisdom to know how much responsibility to give to your children. You may think of times when you have been controlling when you should have been trusting, and you pray for forgiveness.
Notice what you are doing in this meditation: you are allowing the text to remind you of a particular person or a concrete situation. Do not be surprised if it takes you some time to learn to do this; we are accustomed to allowing the text to evoke ideas, not memories. When you ask yourself, ‘what does this Gospel text remind me of? you may answer: it reminds me that it is important to trust people with responsibility. That is an idea or an insight, not a memory. A memory recalls a concrete situation when you saw someone trusted with responsibility. Or you may say: it reminds me that I should have more trust in my children. This may be a moral obligation; it is not a memory. A memory recalls a particular time when you failed to trust your child. That memory might evoke other similar memories and you might become aware of a pattern of distrust in your way of relating to your children. We are often inclined to say: this text reminds me of what I should (or should not) do. Certainly the text has moral implications, but we impoverish our meditation if we go from the text to moral obligations instead of going to our concrete memories.
You widen your meditation to look at the world around you. You may think of a development project in your local community or one you have heard about in Africa or Asia, a project that not only gives the people what they need but also gives them an active part in making the decisions that affect their lives in that place. You pray in thanksgiving.
You may think of the whole world of nature, which God has entrusted to human beings for a long time; as you think of the ways in which we are abusing and destroying this world, you are moved to pray that we will repent and change our ways.
You began your meditation with something Jesus said. As you end your meditation you come back to him. When did Jesus entrust his ‘property’ to others? You remember the time that he sent seventy-two disciples out to preach and to heal on their own (Lk.10. 1-20). At the Last Supper he assures them that those who believe in him will perform even greater works than he himself has performed. (John 14:12) And as he ascends into heaven after his death and resurrection he entrusts his mission to them, ‘Go, therefore, make disciples of all nations….’ (Mt. 28:19).
1.3. A WISDOM MOMENT.
As you look back on your meditations you recognize a pattern: wise people in positions of responsibility are willing to share that responsibility with others and to trust them with it. If you were asked how you know this you could answer: ‘This is not something which I thought out in my head, but something I know in my heart from my own experience.’ That is a wisdom moment to which your meditation has led you. This may be a truth that strikes you for the first time or something you knew but are now seeing with a new clarity . And it invites a commitment: now that I see this, I want to live accordingly.
1.4. A CONTEMPLATIVE MOMENT.
As you moved from one meditation to another you prayed in thanksgiving , in repentance and in petition. As you come to a wisdom moment, you may find your prayer deepening, you no longer feel to make prayers of thanks or petition, you simply rest in the words of the passage. You may feel to repeat over and over a few words like, ‘He entrusted his property to them.’
You are not likely to experience a wisdom moment or a contemplative moment each time you do lectio divina, but it is always useful to ask at the end of your meditation: what wisdom did I become aware of in this passage?